Conversion post-Oct. 7: Quest for answers in sea of questions
'What’s a Jew? Who is a Jew? I didn’t really have a good answer. So after Oct. 7, I needed to figure some of that out'
Justin Rubenstein took the plunge. Last week, following a year of studying about Judaism and a lifetime pondering his relationship to the faith, Rubenstein immersed in a mikvah.
After exiting the purifying bath, the lawyer and father dried himself, dressed and continued his Jewish journey — a process, he said, that involves increased study and synagogue attendance.
Those practices are intended to foster closeness with community at Temple Emanuel of South Hills, but what led Rubenstein to the mikvah and its hundreds of gallons of naturally gathered water were a mix of both local interactions and episodes transpiring far from his western Pennsylvanian home.
Who am I?
Since childhood, Rubenstein, 45, was routinely asked by classmates and friends if he was Jewish.
“My father converted to Christianity when I was young, and we were pretty much raised Christian growing up,” he said. Apart from attending a cousin’s bar mitzvah, “I didn’t know a whole lot.”
Still, because of his last name, Rubenstein was repeatedly probed about his connections to Judaism.
Years passed. Rubenstein married a Catholic woman and fathered two children.
Fifteen months ago, “I was going through some things personally,” he said, including a divorce. “I was in this position where I was really trying to figure out who I wanted to be going forward, what I was interested in, and needed a little bit more of a bedrock.”
On Oct. 7, 2023, 6,000 miles from Rubenstein’s Washington County home, Hamas terrorists attacked the Jewish state, murdered 1,200 men, women and children, and abducted more than 250 hostages.
“Initially, I started looking out at everything that was happening with not just Israel, but Jews worldwide. I just needed to know more,” he said. “I have family that’s Jewish, but what’s a Jew? Who is a Jew? I didn’t really have a good answer. So after Oct. 7, I needed to figure some of that out.”
Rubenstein scoured Google. He read Sara Hurwitz’s 2019 book, “Here All Along,” and searched for a local course about Judaism.
Though Washington County has a Jewish presence dating to the 19th century, its community has dwindled; its last synagogue was sold in 2023. Rubenstein discovered an educational offering online through American Jewish University, a private Los Angeles-based institution. The four-month class operated according to a West Coast schedule. Each Monday night, the Pennsylvanian signed on from 9 p.m.-midnight Eastern Time.
Given responsibilities at work and home — Rubenstein’s kids are 13 and 11 — those were the only hours “I could squeeze in,” he said.
Week after week, Rubenstein learned about Jewish culture and practice from rabbis and teachers. When the course ended, Rubenstein determined he needed a community and began attending Friday night services at Temple Emanuel and meeting with its spiritual leader, Rabbi Aaron Meyer.
“I continued to read whatever I could get my hands on,” Rubenstein said.
Between the texts, meetings and continued synagogue attendance, Rubenstein learned about living the Jewish calendar.
“The holidays were all kind of new to me, other than Hanukkah,” he said.
Finally, after speaking with a beit din (Jewish court), Rubenstein headed to the mikvah.
Shalom friends
Last week’s visit to the ritual bath marked a milestone in Rubenstein’s Jewish journey. But his experience isn’t uncommon. Several local rabbis told the Chronicle they’ve seen an increased interest in Judaism, and conversion, post-Oct. 7.
Congregation Beth Shalom’s Senior Rabbi Seth Adelson is currently meeting with eight individuals interested in joining the Jewish fold.
The number is “very unusual,” Adelson said. “I went from having maybe an average of three over the past several years to now eight.”
The increase of potential converts in Pittsburgh since the Oct. 7 attack reflects a national trend, “both from people who were already in the process of converting and from people who had never before been in touch,” according to a JTA report based on interviews with rabbis around the country. The rise has occurred even as the attack and the ensuing war have fueled antisemitic incidents around the world.

Adelson’s students didn’t arrive on his doorstep Oct. 8, 2023.
“They sort of trickled in,” he said.
First in March, then throughout the next several months, several people asked about converting.
Adelson spoke with each person and shared a list of requirements, including a “commitment to Jewish living,” which he noted includes “tefillah (prayer), holiday observances, kashrut (dietary observances) and Shabbat.”
Also required is completion of a local Introduction to Judaism course. Spread across three terms, the 25-week class, which includes Jews and non-Jews and follows the AJU curriculum, is taught by members of the Greater Pittsburgh Jewish Clergy Association.
Rabbi Mark Asher Goodman directs the course and said he’s seen increased enrollment during the past three years, with this year’s group of almost 60 being the largest yet.
Goodman hasn’t heard everyone’s rationale for registering, but said students rarely have just one reason for signing up — the exception being post-Oct. 27, 2018, when an antisemite stormed the Tree of Life building and murdered 11 people from three congregations in the midst of Shabbat prayer.
“We had a significant number of people, even in 2019 and 2020, saying that Oct. 27 and the shooting was something that prompted them to want to learn more about Judaism.”
Goodman doesn’t think Oct. 7 spurred the same desire.
“I think there was a tremendous outpouring of sympathy and understanding on Oct. 27, after the shooting in 2018, and this deep sense of these people who were in prayer, and they’re practicing their values, and committed to their community, and they endured a terrible tragedy,” Goodman said. “And I think Oct. 7 was also a terrible tragedy, and horrendous and heartbreaking, but the war that followed it then created a lot more mixed feelings and complexity between the non-Jewish and the Jewish communities.”

Another possible reason that fewer people cite Oct. 7 as the impetus for learning, Goodman believes, is “there’s the fact that Israel is all the way over there, and Squirrel Hill and Pittsburgh is right here,” he said. “That makes it feel a lot harder to kind of wrap your brain around.”
Along with directing the course, Goodman is mentoring seven people for conversion. The process involves regular check-ins. Days ago, one of his students wanted to talk about Zionism.
“She wasn’t really familiar with the concept, or why Zionism was slightly more controversial for some,” he said.
The conversation, Goodman continued, was a “really interesting eye-opener” about the recent crop of Intro to Judaism registrants, most of whom are under 35 years old.
“They don’t really have that long-term historical vision of the state of Israel being a lifeboat for the Jewish people after the horrors of the Holocaust,” Goodman said. “They don’t understand Israel’s place in the world. They don’t really know the heroic stories of Israel’s founding from ‘48, and their story of resistance, and overcoming in ‘67 and ’73. People who are 35 and younger have grown up with the Intifada One, the Intifada Two and kind of a failed two-state situation.”
For the majority of younger learners, Israel is “mostly controversial now, as opposed to Israel being mostly kind of heroic and inspiring,” he added.
During its 25-week span, Pittsburgh’s Intro to Judaism course addresses Zionism.
“We’re very focused on the history, and ‘just the facts ma’am,’ and kind of understanding the necessity of Israel,” Goodman said. “The history of the politics, the history of the conflict, is not the focus of the class. We try and make space for it, but we say at the end, ‘Your mileage may vary, it’s important for you to stay engaged in this, and if you feel one way or another politically on this issue, that’s great — that is reflected in the larger Jewish community, where people have a belief in one state or a one-state solution, a belief in a two-state solution, or a belief in this, that or the other outcome for the Palestinians. Those are beliefs that we want you to explore, but we don’t necessarily want to impart some view upon you.’”
When Israel was in Egypt’s land
Even before beginning the conversion process, Rubenstein was interested in Middle Eastern politics and tales about ancient Israel.
“The history of the Jewish people is just an incredible history of suffering in one sense, but also perseverance,” he said. “Going back to biblical times, all the way back to the Exodus, there is suffering, and being delivered and persevering.”
For Rubenstein, that narrative gained new significance.

“With what I was going through personally — kind of feeling the same type of thing, of things falling apart but yet persevering to something different and better — that kind of dovetailed in Oct. 7,” he said. “That was really kind of a flash point for me to say, ‘Yeah, I need to figure this out and really get into it, because these things continue to go on.’ It didn’t end with the Holocaust. It didn’t end with the establishment of Israel. There are issues, and not just in the Middle East, but everywhere — I mean, the synagogue attack in Pittsburgh was another factor — there are people out there that just don’t like Jewish people for whatever reason, irrational or whatever, but it’s historical. And so I felt a need to embrace that and really understand it.”
As Rubenstein immersed himself in Judaism, his appreciation grew.
“I came to understand that I want to be a part of that story,” he said. “I want to stand in that tradition, with the Jewish people, in the Jewish community.”
There’s the benefit of collective experience, but there’s also a personal draw to conversion, he continued. “For me, it’s also a spiritual and mindfulness practice of how to be a better person and how to live a better life.”
It’s the questions
Several rabbis who spoke with the Chronicle recalled various conversion tales and reasons why people decided to adopt a new faith.
Events may prompt someone’s desire, but when people are drawn to Judaism because they “fundamentally feel that they should be Jewish, that they belong with the Jewish people, that they want to be a part of us, that’s always a rewarding experience,” Adelson said.
Shortly before entering the mikvah last week, Rubenstein met with a beit din. The three-member panel of Jewish judges asked him why he wanted to complete the process.
“I said it felt to me like walking into the ocean,” he recalled. “You start, you dip your toes in, you walk a little bit more, you get up to your ankles and your knees, and then you start swimming and you realize just there’s so much more to go that’s so deep and so wide. That’s how I feel.”
Nearly 2,000 years ago, another convert articulated similar tropes. According to legend, Ben Bag-Bag was a Roman soldier who asked the great Jewish sages Shammai and Hillel to teach him the whole Torah while standing on one foot. Although Shammai dismissed the inquiry, Hillel said, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to another. That is the entire Torah. The rest is interpretation. Go study.”
Tradition teaches that Ben Bag-Bag converted, grew in scholarship and later said of the Torah: “Turn it over, and turn it over, for all is in it. Look into it, and become gray and old in it. Do not move away from it, for you have no better portion than it.”
Rubenstein came to Judaism because of questions. Immersion in the mikvah didn’t provide all the answers.
That’s the point, he said. “The very name Israel means to wrestle with God. I think that after Oct. 7, and wondering what that all meant, and then what I was going through personally, with my marriage falling apart, I guess I always knew that to some extent, but it really struck me at that moment to think, ‘Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m wrestling with God and what does all this mean, what’s the purpose? How do we live, right? That’s really the question. How do you live?’” PJC
Adam Reinherz can be reached at areinherz@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.
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